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- [00:01]
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Have you ever wanted tech news like so bad that just the idea of waiting while some guy he just kind of was talking, he just goes and there's unrelated thing. So how did and how did that feel Apple's week of announcements continued this morning with the MacBook Neo powered by an A18 Pro, the same chip used in the iPhone 16 Pro models. What? Or almost the same. The Neo loses one GPU core, but keeps the six CPU cores and sadly, the paltry eight gigabytes of unified memory. But hey, Agent Smith also underestimated Neo the guy, not the MacBook. And look what happened to him. Melted into goo. I saw the movies. Really? The key detail Here is the MacBook Neo starts with 256 gigs of storage for $599 at a time when computer prices are threatening to get on a big rocket and leave the solar system. The power of Apple's chips has essentially been overkill for their devices for a while, so I will be a bit shocked if this entry level MacBook isn't enough for most people. Speaking of overkill though, Apple also announced that 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros can now be configured with the brand new M5 Pro and M5 Max, which not only feature more cores, memory and storage, but but also a new chiplet based design we're supposed to call Fusion Architecture. If we don't want to incur Tim Cook's wrath gnashing of teeth. That was Tim Cook, by the way. Apple has also done some confusing things with their CPU cores. Efficiency cores are the same, but what used to be called performance cores are now called super cores. And in between them there's a new type of core that is taking the performance core designation from what are now called super cores. Do you understand? Look TL. Dr. The chips are powerful enough to make more of whatever is going on with this beautiful mesmerizing CGI goo. And that's good enough for me. There's also a new M5 MacBook Air whose promo video specifically mentions starting with 16 gigabytes of unified memory and 512 gigabytes of storage in what seems like a very topical callout. Current events. Then there's also a new studio display and Studio display xdr, which seem cool, but we don't even have time to talk about them. Six products during a non Apple event. The Cook was feeling saucy this week. Get it? That's a two for one pun. Tim Cook Applesauce Connor okay, OpenAI CEO and Boots sommelier Sam Altman is claiming he's renegotiating OpenAI's Pentagon contract in response to backlash from users and employees. The negative response was prompted by what happened last Friday, when, hours after the government blacklisted Anthropic for refusing to let the Pentagon use Claude without safety guardrails, OpenAI swooped in and announced its own deal with the Department of War. Naturally, this went over great, with ChatGPT uninstalls surging 295% in the fallout and Anthropic's Claude shooting to number one on the app Store. Altman eventually admitted the original deal seemed opportunistic and sloppy in an internal memo that he also posted to Twitter stating now that new contract language would explicitly prohibit the use of OpenAI's models for domestic surveillance of Americans. Scam. I'm sorry, Sam Altman is now claiming that the Department of War has agreed to OpenAI's red lines on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. But according to multiple sources who spoke to the Verge and many other people, the Pentagon never actually budged on the contract terms. OpenAI's contract simply defers to existing US laws that have historically been used to justify mass surveillance. OpenAI's own former head of policy research said employees should assume that OpenAI caved and then framed it as not caving. So to sum up, the guy whose first company got acquired after he lied about how many users there were, then got fired from being president of Y Combinator for conflicts of interest, then started the nonprofit that stole the entire Internet, then withheld information from his board about launching ChatGPT, then arguably stole Scarlett Johansson's voice for ChatGPT, then argued that AI training is fine because it uses less energy than human life, is continuing to be less than forthright with the public, no? An investigation by Swedish newspapers SVD and Gutbergsposten sure has found that Meta has been sending intimate user footage from its Ray Ban AI glasses to human moderators in Kenya. Kenya, of all places. Workers at Meta subcontractor Sama said they've reviewed videos of people wearing these glasses on on the toilet, undressing and being intimate with each other, which is impressive. It can't be easy attracting a mate while wearing one of these things. One worker told reporters that they regularly see everything from banking details to naked bodies. All the things you'd want. Engadget noted that reporters had to jump through a bunch of hoops just to find Meta's wearable privacy policy, which puts the onus on users to not share sensitive information. Meta's AI terms of service explicitly state that Meta retains the right to review your interactions with its AIs, and that review may be automated or manual. The only solution Meta offers is to tell users not to share information on these recordings. I guess that you don't want the AIs to use and retain, which basically translates to don't record it if you don't want a stranger to see it. And with Meta's upcoming name tag feature adding facial recognition to the glasses, this mass data collection doesn't bode well for human beings who don't like being mass surveilled in a Neal Stephenson esque dystopia. What's that? You'd prefer AI enabled products to have rigorous security standards and to explicitly promise not to train AI models on your data? Well, psh then, that's our sponsor.
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And now we gotta do it. What? Okay, Quick bits headlines about Windows 12 releasing this year flooded the Internet this week, all tracing back to a PC World article translated from their German sister site PC Welt, which sourced a bunch of rumors from apparently irre gesace context clues. What do you think it means? Their butt. PC World has since admitted the piece failed editorial standards, with Windows Central stepping in to quickly debunk the mess, confirming that Windows 12 is absolutely probably not happening this year. Great news, as Microsoft still needs at least a few years to figure out how to squeeze ads into the volume slider. There's a way Google is officially rolling out Android 16's desktop mode after it was trapped for a year in the developer beta. The feature allows all Pixel phones newer than the Pixel to connect to an external display via a USB C cable that supports DisplayPort for a full desktop experience. The mode features multi window app support and works seamlessly with a keyboard and mouse. Now you can proudly tell your boss you're working from your phone and they'll forgive you for getting less work done, even though you could get more work done because your phone is a desktop now. Oh man, that'll get em so good. AI's hunger for tasty DDR5 RAM has allowed the market to be exploited by scalper bots Security Firm DataDome detected one operation that fired over 10 million scraping requests at DDR5 product pages. One sample, extracted over one hour had 50,000 requests with one hit every 6.5 seconds. While the top 100 tech companies have enough market leverage to secure supply, the RAM shortage has left a battleground where 190,000 small to mid sized enterprises are left fighting scalp and nail. Can't wait for Michael Bay's Aliens versus Scalper Predators, rated R for restricted memory. Google's Threat Intelligence Group exposed Koruna, a powerful iPhone exploit. Uh oh, didn't wanna make it sound cool that can affect iPhones running iOS 13 through 17, which came out in 2023. The kit entails 23 vulnerabilities across five attack chains and can be used to bypass iPhone defenses and silently install malware as soon as your device visits a website containing the exploitation code. Security firm Iverify suggests Karuna was initially used by the US government, bearing similarities to the EternalBlue Windows exploit. It's already been used by suspected Russian spies against Ukrainians and in a hacking campaign infecting Chinese crypto and gambling sites. It's unlikely these hackers will target your parents, who would rather eat lead than update their phones, but you might wanna try convincing them one more time, just in case. And Xiaomi has reported success with tests around integrating humanoid robots into assembly line work in its EV factory in China. Xiaomi posted a video showing off the robots working on the floor, and according to the company, they hit a 90% success rate over three straight hours, completing each cycle in 76 seconds to match the production line's pace with the human workers. President Lu Y Bing told CNBC that at their current level of performance, they see the robots more like interns.
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Wow.
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Here in the west, we're worried that robots will be faster and better than human workers. Workers in China get so much done that the robots have to intern first just to keep up. They can build a hospital in like 30 minutes. Hopefully the robots are getting credits for it at Robo University. And you better enroll here again on Friday or you're not gonna have enough tech news credits to graduate. And then you won't get a good tech news watching job and you'll have to move back in with your parents. Just kidding. You never moved out of your parents in this economy, so that's why you should come back.